Democratic Republic of the Congo

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Democratic Republic of the Congo holds enough cobalt to power the world's electric cars, yet ranks 171 out of 193 countries on the Human Development Index in 2023. This is a country of staggering contradictions. Its untapped mineral deposits are estimated to be worth more than 24 trillion dollars. At the same time, around 73.5 percent of its people lived below the international poverty line of 2.15 dollars a day as of 2024. It is the second-largest country in Africa by land area, home to roughly 124 million people, and the most populous Francophone country on Earth. How did a nation this rich become one of the world's poorest and least developed? Why does a single river give it both its name and its only outlet to the Atlantic? And how did one man, ruling for decades, turn government itself into a system of organized theft? The answers run through rainforests, rebel armies, and a name that has changed six times in living memory.

• 2. A Name From The River

  ›

  The Congo River is the world's deepest river and the third-largest by discharge, and the country carries its name. Early European sailors named the river in the 16th century after the Kingdom of Kongo and its Bantu inhabitants, the Kongo people. The American writer Samuel Henry Nelson observed that the word likely implies a public gathering, built on the root konga, meaning to gather. In October 1971, President Mobutu Sese Seko renamed the country Zaire, drawing on a past name for the river. The word Zaire comes from a Portuguese adaptation of the Kikongo word nzadi, meaning river, truncated from a phrase meaning river swallowing rivers. Over the centuries the land has been called the Congo Free State, the Belgian Congo, the Republic of the Congo-Léopoldville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Republic of Zaire, before returning to its present name. The Luluabourg Constitution of August 1964 first made it the DRC. President Laurent-Désiré Kabila restored that name in 1997 after overthrowing Mobutu. To separate it from the neighboring Republic of the Congo, people call it Congo-Kinshasa, after the capital that was once Léopoldville.

• 3. Leopold's Possession

  ›

  King Leopold II of Belgium acquired rights to the Congo territory in 1885 and called it the Congo Free State, ruling it as his personal possession. From the 1870s to 1908 he used forced labor and concessionary companies to extract rubber. Violence, disease, and exploitation caused catastrophic population loss across the territory. The 1904 Casement Report exposed the abuses to an international audience, and diplomatic pressure mounted. In 1908, Leopold ceded the territory and it became the Belgian colony known as the Belgian Congo, governed directly from Brussels. That change ended the most extreme abuses, but Belgian rule continued patterns of direct control, racial segregation, forced labor, and repression. The colonial state worked closely with missionaries and private companies to prioritize economic extraction. After the Second World War, urbanization and limited social programs fostered a small African middle class. Political exclusion persisted, feeding nationalist movements in the late 1950s. The writer Adam Hochschild noted in 2009 that government as a system of organized theft goes back to King Leopold II, a lineage the country would struggle to escape.

• 4. Lumumba And The Crisis

  ›

  On the 24th of June 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo. His Mouvement National Congolais had won the parliamentary elections in May, and parliament elected Joseph Kasa-Vubu as president. Independence came on the 30th of June 1960, but it unraveled within days. The Force Publique mutinied, and on the 11th of July the province of Katanga under Moïse Tshombe and the region of South Kasai launched secessionist struggles. Most of the 100,000 Europeans who had stayed after independence fled the country. When the United Nations refused to help crush the secessions, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union, which sent military supplies and advisers. On the 5th of September 1960, Kasa-Vubu dismissed him, blaming him for massacres in South Kasai and for involving the Soviets. Lumumba argued the dismissal was illegal, since Congolese law gave parliament, not the president, the power to remove a minister. Both houses rejected the dismissal, yet it proceeded unconstitutionally. On the 17th of January 1961, Lumumba was handed to Katangan authorities and executed by Belgian-led Katangan troops. A 2001 investigation by Belgium's Parliament found the country morally responsible for his murder, and Belgium has since officially apologized.

• 5. Mobutu's Kleptocracy

  ›

  Colonel Joseph Mobutu, with backing from the United States and Belgium, removed Lumumba from office on the 14th of September 1960, then seized full power in a 1965 coup. Lumumba himself had earlier appointed Mobutu chief of staff of the new Congolese army. The United States supported Mobutu firmly because of his opposition to communism, viewing him as a counter to communist movements in Africa. He built a single-party system, declared himself head of state, and held elections in which he was the only candidate. Corruption grew so pervasive that the term le mal Zairois, the Zairian sickness, was coined to describe the theft and mismanagement. A relative of Mobutu described how money was drained from the state: Mobutu would ask for a million, an intermediary would withdraw ten, and the family kept nine. Mobutu allegedly amassed between 50 million and 125 million US dollars during his rule. International loans enriched him while roads and infrastructure decayed to as little as a quarter of what existed in 1960. He renamed cities starting on the 1st of June 1966, turning Léopoldville into Kinshasa and Stanleyville into Kisangani. After the Soviet Union dissolved, US support cooled, and armed forces drove him into exile, where he died in Morocco in September 1997.

• 6. The Congo Wars

  ›

  By 1996, Rwandan Hutu militia forces known as the Interahamwe had fled into eastern Zaire and used refugee camps as bases for raids against Rwanda. A coalition of Rwandan and Ugandan armies invaded to overthrow Mobutu, launching the First Congo War alongside Laurent-Désiré Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the Congo. Kabila marched into Kinshasa in 1997, named himself president, and then asked the foreign forces to go home. That request triggered the Second Congo War in 1998, as Rwandan and Ugandan troops backed new rebel movements against the army they had helped install. Angolan, Zimbabwean, and Namibian militaries joined on the government's side. The most widely reported death toll for that war is 5.4 million people, though other estimates put it at three million, making it the deadliest conflict since World War II. Kabila was assassinated in 2001, and his son Joseph Kabila succeeded him and called for peace talks. UN peacekeepers known as MONUC arrived in April 2001. On the 30th of July 2006, the country held its first multi-party elections, the first free national vote since 1960. Joseph Kabila won the second round and was sworn in as president in December 2006.

• 7. M23 And The East

  ›

  Goma, one of the region's largest cities, was occupied by M23 rebels in 2012 and again since 2025. The east has never known lasting peace. Over 120 armed groups remain active there, and the country holds around 6.9 million internally displaced people, more than five million of them in North Kivu, South Kivu, and Ituri. Joseph Kabila stepped down in 2019 after Félix Tshisekedi won the contentious 2018 election, the country's first peaceful transition of power since independence. Yet election-day polls suggested Martin Fayulu was expected to take 47 percent of the vote, against 23 percent for Tshisekedi, fueling suspicions the result was rigged. The M23 movement resurged in 2022 with military support from Rwanda. In early 2025 the conflict escalated as M23 captured Goma and Bukavu with thousands of Rwandan troops. A United States-brokered peace deal was signed on the 27th of June 2025, calling for Rwandan troops to withdraw within 90 days. Despite the treaty, the UN Human Rights Office found that hostilities increased from January to July 2025, with hundreds of civilians allegedly massacred in four villages within Rutshuru. In October 2025, former president Joseph Kabila was sentenced to death in absentia for alleged collaboration with M23.

• 8. The Resource Curse

  ›

  The country possesses 80 percent of the world's cobalt reserves and produced 70 percent of the global supply in 2023. In February 2018, the asset management firm AllianceBernstein called the DRC the Saudi Arabia of the electric vehicle age, because cobalt is essential to the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars. The country also holds 70 percent of the world's coltan, more than 30 percent of its diamond reserves, and a tenth of its copper. Minerals and metal made up 80 percent of exports in 2023, and China was the largest trade partner, representing 41 percent of exports in 2024. Yet this wealth has not lifted the population. At independence in 1960, the DRC was the second-most-industrialized country in Africa after South Africa. By the early 1990s, after falling commodity prices, corruption, and hyperinflation, the formal economy had nearly ceased to exist. The country is a prominent example of the resource curse. In 2007 and 2008, Joseph Kabila's administration entered a resources-for-infrastructure deal with China, creating the joint venture Sicomines, which received mining rights in exchange for a promised 3 billion dollar investment. An investigation under Tshisekedi found that less than 1 billion dollars had been spent on infrastructure. After renegotiation, the infrastructure commitment was raised to 7 billion dollars in 2024, a sign of how high the stakes remain over what lies beneath the Congo Basin.